POLITICAL strategists like to tell their charges to stay in touch with their 'inner child' - it helps that ever-valuable ability to 'connect' with a range of people when out on the stump. For anyone wondering just what sort of child beats inside the ambitious hearts of presidential candidates Vice-President Al Gore and his Republican rival George W. Bush, these are intriguing times.
America's media outlets are taking advantage of the relative lull in campaigning before the national conventions in July and August to dredge over the childhoods of both men. And the results are not necessarily pretty.
The venerable New York Times is leading the charge, this week publishing in-depth investigations of both men as children, unearthing facts that have escaped other biographers and will undoubtedly find their way into myth by the time the November polls roll around. The stereotypical portrayals of both men - Mr Gore the stiff, wooden politico and Mr Bush the none-too-bright ageing frat-boy - remain solidly intact.
Both men are third-generation politicians but there the similarities end. Mr Bush's formative years were spent in the conservative oil town of Midland, west Texas. His father, former president George, took his young family from the security of the northeast to Midland to help continue the family fortune. His life as a senior Republican Party figure and later president was still years away. Before they moved into a cookie-cutter suburban home with pool, the Bushes lived frugally. Their first apartment had a bathroom they had to share with a mother-and-daughter pair of prostitutes. For young 'Dubya', it was an uncluttered, mischievous existence dominated by a deep love of baseball. George W. was a little-leaguer and built the best collection of baseball cards in town, showing a certain cunning by sending them off to top players across America to autograph. The class clown, he was no academic, an image that dogs him today. What reading he did never strayed far from the 'Hardy Boys' mysteries.
Trouble was never far away. His mother Barbara tells of having to wash his mouth out with soap after she caught him using racial profanities - then, she claims, in common usage in the rough-hewn boomtown. After rainstorms, George and his friends would blow up frogs with fire-crackers or shoot them with air-rifles. 'We were terrible to animals,' said his friend Terry Throckmorton. They then had the temerity to clean themselves up and have milk and cookies at the home of the gentle old lady who ran the Society of Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
For Mr Gore, life was a little more complex. For a man who likes to parade his Tennessee poor-boy roots on the campaign, he was steeped in the Washington establishment from a very young age. His father, Albert Gore, was a Democrat senator respected for his honesty and integrity. While young Gore did grow up in the Fairfax Hotel, very much the baby of the family, and attend the prestigious St Albans grade school in DC, the Gores returned each summer to Tennessee. His father forced him to work so hard on the family farm, both his mother and the hired help feared he was being pushed too hard.
Not quite believing Mr Gore's campaign lines - having a thirst for knowledge and wanting to be a teacher - the Times reports with almost a sigh that, yes, Mr Gore was a very earnest and serious child. Even his first crush, Donna Armistead, reports that 'he pretty much acted the same way when he was 13 as he does now'.